October Meditation Challenge... The First Three Days! in October Meditation Challenge

Three days down, 27 (or 28, since October has 31 days) to go!

Before I started this, I thought a bit about why I decided to do a 30-day Meditation Challenge. Why meditation? What was I hoping to gain from this? What was my intention? I know I want to gain clarity, but what does that even mean?

For me, clarity is my intuition, which I want to honor and develop. I want to get in touch with my own inner guide, the steady point for me to come back to when I’m feeling pulled in a hundred different directions.
I want to learn to stay present, to really see what is around me, being grateful for what I already have, right now… and I want to continue to attract that abundance into my life. I want to make the most of every moment without worrying about what has happened or what will be. I want to practice seeing people and circumstances just as they are, not colored by my own scripts.

On a strictly practical level, I want to get better at sticking with something. Consistency has always been something I’ve lacked, and I know that causes issues in so many different areas of my life, namely work.

And maybe most importantly, I want to develop my faith. I don’t mean that in the Christian sense – Christianity in particular has never been my thing – but more and more lately I understand the need for faith in a person’s life. I get why people hold on for dear life to the belief that everything will be ok, that everything happens for a reason, that “only right action is happening right now.” My bigger picture might not be salvation or Heaven vs. Hell, but I understand the need for one… whatever it may be.

So the last three days, I’ve been sitting for 5 minutes. I sit upright in a chair, with my hands palm up and my shoes off, feet flat on the floor (it helps me feel more connected to the Earth, even if that “Earth” is my carpet in my apartment which is actually above the carport). I close my eyes and breathe in and out through my nose, usually visualizing an ocean because my breath always reminds me of waves.

The first day, I made it through the full 5 minutes without so much as a twitch. I tried the visualization technique of a prosperity bubble

, but it was sporadic at best. My thoughts kept drifting to sounds around me, to itches on my face, to what C might be doing right at that moment, to what I should make for dinner, to what I wanted to get done that day. I didn’t fight any of those thoughts, I just let them float back and forth through my mind like a movie screen, and came back to the bubble whenever I could. The time went off before I’d even realized it had been 5 minutes.

The second day was the same approach, same general results. Tried to visualize the bubble but it kept flashing back to chores and dinner possibilities and me trying to decide what prosperity even means to me.

And today, Day 3… this was probably the least “successful” of the days so far. Thoughts of what I should do today were bright and insistent this time, there was no chance to visualize anything but bright flashes of light as these seemingly urgent thoughts slammed around. I worried that I should have made a to-do list first, I should have written my Morning Pages first, or maybe not, maybe I should have mediated earlier, as soon as I woke up. I tried using a Spotify meditation playlist but the song was so annoying I actually started to feel angry at it, but I refused to open my eyes and turn it off. Then I freaked out thinking I forgot to start the timer and couldn’t resist opening my eyes, just to check. I had set it and there was 40 seconds left. That wasn’t enough time to try to get into anything else, so I called it a day.

So there you have it, the first three days of my attempts at meditation. I’m not sure if I’ll try different types of meditation – guided, music, silent, what have you – or if I’ll stick with the same as a control to really see the difference. I don’t know if the type matters as much as the daily practice, so we’ll see.